Experts say it's unlikely NSA helped foreign case

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. official said Monday that the National Security Agency did not monitor phone calls between a New Zealand journalist and his Afghan sources, following claims that his reporting was monitored by the U.S. intelligence programs revealed by Edward Snowden on behalf of New Zealand's military.

Officials in the intelligence community and experts said if any surveillance was done, it was more likely that his phone calls were caught up by standard military intelligence monitoring of enemy communications in war zones.

The Obama administration brushed off new allegations of NSA surveillance overreach, this time focusing on freelance reporter Jon Stephenson, who was in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for American news service McClatchy and other media outlets when his phone records were reportedly seized.

It was the latest revelation in the ongoing debate over government snooping since Snowden in June revealed two top secret U.S. programs that monitor millions of Americans' telephone and Internet communications each day.

The U.S. government official said NSA did not target Stephenson or collect his phone records. A U.S. intelligence official suggested that any surveillance could have been run by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which oversees war zone intelligence missions. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the secret program. The DIA did not comment.

On Sunday, the Star-Times newspaper of New Zealand reported that the New Zealand military conspired with U.S. spy agencies to monitor Stephenson's communications with sources in Afghanistan. New Zealand officials denied the new allegations.

But experts and former intelligence officials said if Stephenson's phone records were collected, they would have been gathered in a military intelligence sweep that is shared among allies -- and has for years monitored most communications in war zones, where there is little expectation of privacy.

New Zealand withdrew its small contingent of roughly 150 troops from Afghanistan earlier this year. But the country's Government Communications Security Bureau, which is New Zealand's NSA equivalent, would have been included in an allied intelligence gathering and reporting system in Afghanistan, said Canadian intelligence expert Wesley Wark.

Wark said the New Zealand security bureau also would have been able to access a secret system once code-named "Stoneghost," which allows it to share and draw from intelligence reports compiled from four other counties -- the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. Stoneghost was one portal through which the so-called Five Eyes allies, the U.S., U.K, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, shared data.

"It is entirely possible that New Zealand intelligence ran its own surveillance operation against Stephenson on the basis of access to a common allied intelligence pool in Afghanistan without necessarily requiring any direct U.S. input or involvement," said Wark, a national security professor at University of Ottawa.

He added: "It would not have been beyond the means of a small New Zealand contingent to do this on their own."

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said Monday it's possible that reporters could get caught in surveillance nets when the U.S. spies on enemy combatants. But generally, those nations do not spy on each other's citizens and residents.

The NSA would not spy on citizens of another ally in that group, especially if it were to circumvent that ally's own espionage laws, said former Michigan congressman and House intelligence committee chairman Pete Hoekstra.

What's picked up in war zones is considered fair game, however, and such surveillance has been a priority in Afghanistan as American troops prepare to withdraw in 2014. NATO and U.S. officials depend on the intelligence systems to detect and disrupt al-Qaida and the Taliban plots against the Afghan government and foreign forces.

American troops who specialize in intelligence gathering routinely tap directly into local cellphone company servers, or conduct technical surveillance though a number of electronic listening devices that are placed on jets, drones, ships and satellites, according to a current U.S. military official and a former one. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified surveillance program.

Each branch of the U.S. military has its own signals intelligence unit, including Task Force Odin, an Army aviation battalion created in Iraq to spot bomb makers, planters and plotters. The Odin unit's skills and some of its personnel were moved to Afghanistan -- but likely under a new name -- after it helped military counterterrorism units to track al-Qaida and other extremists.

In Iraq, where the war zone monitoring was first perfected, the cellphone metadata and an unknown number of phone calls were recorded and stored, said the former U.S. military official. When a terrorist suspect was captured or killed, their cellphones and other possessions were examined. Any phone numbers that could be retrieved were run through a U.S. telephone database, and relevant records and phone conversations retrieved.

U.S. troops and contractors also are told their own satellite and Internet communications likely will be intercepted by their own nation's counterintelligence personnel, and checked for possible breaches of secrecy like the release of classified information, the officials said.

While the U.S. could legally monitor a foreign national civilian in a war zone, it would be unlikely. Wark said that it's possible that Washington nonetheless could have targeted Stephenson, given the breadth of U.S. information-gathering abilities. But he called that "rare," saying the U.S. generally would have needed to have a direct national interest in Stephenson to devote assets against him.

But if Stephenson was calling Afghans who are suspected of ties to militants, and who in turn were being monitored by U.S. or NATO spy services, that conversation could be recorded, transcribed and distributed. Usually, names of people who are not suspected of wrongdoing are deleted, according to one former administration official, and one former intelligence official.

The same practice applies to U.S. journalists, if they are talking to foreigners being monitored by the NSA in the U.S., the officials said.